The Soviet Union and the Palestinian Liberation Struggle

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Opening Theme

Palestinian National Anthem

You’re listening to Back in the USSR here on CFRU 93.3 FM, I am Siegfried, and this week we’re continuing our discussion of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and an end to the system of Israeli colonial Apartheid in historic Palestine.  If you’ll recall, last week I played an interview that I did a few years ago on American sociologist Al Szymanski and his book “Human Rights in the Soviet Union” and one of the main things he talks about in that book is how the USSR treated national minorities and how it effectively abolished the national oppression that had been the norm suffered by many peoples under the old Tsarist Russian Empire.  It puts things in perspective that the Palestinian people would have enjoyed far more freedom and far greater rights as a minority in the Soviet Union than they currently do as a majority in their occupied and colonized homeland.

I’ve previously touched on the role that the Soviet Union itself played in supporting the Palestinian liberation struggle during the Cold War years.  Indeed, the dominant narrative in the US media during the 1980s Reagan administration was that Moscow was the font and source of practically all terrorist activity in the world.  Of course this was at the same time as the US and its proxies were slaughtering tens of thousands of people in Central American countries like El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua while the CIA was in the process of creating the modern jihadist movement in order to destabilize and overthrow the socialist government of Afghanistan and its Soviet backers.  Of course the “terrorists” that the Soviet Union was backing were in reality the progressive anti-colonial and national liberation movements throughout the Third World, notably including the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and the African National Congress (ANC), both of which were considered terrorist organizations by the US government at the time, just as people like Nelson Mandela and Yasser Arafat were considered terrorist leaders because they wanted real self-determination for black South Africans and Palestinians respectively and were willing to work with the Soviet Union, Cuba, Libya, East Germany and other socialist states to achieve their goals in the face of Western hostility.

Now the Palestinian struggle during the Cold War years was quite different from the Palestinian struggle today in the 21^st Century because it was taking place on wholly different terms.  In the era before the Oslo Accords, the Palestinians had multiple strong allies who were willing to back their cause materially as well as politically.  Syria, Iraq, and Libya were strong, independent Arab nationalist states at the time and, although disputes did arise, were generally dependable in their support for the Palestinian cause.  The Soviet Union went far beyond providing diplomatic support and actually trained a whole generation of Palestinian leaders in its military academies and provided actual military support for Palestinian groups fighting Israeli occupation on the ground.  This situation changed entirely when the Cold War ended and this support disappeared.  As I’ve talked about in prior shows, the Palestinian leadership lost a lot of the leverage it originally had vis a vis Israel, and its position would only get weaker as its Arab allies like Iraq, Syria and Libya faced the cruel realities of a US-dominated world order that would in fact spell destruction for many of them.  While world opinion remained on their side and the US and Israel were and still remain isolated at the UN when it comes to Palestine, the ability of states to provide real material assistance to the struggle of the Palestinian people was dramatically curtailed.  With the negotiation of the Oslo Accords in 1993, the Palestinians had already lost a great deal and this showed itself dramatically at the negotiating table where the Israelis their US backers were now effectively holding all the cards.

While it had never been a level playing field to begin with, the diplomatic, political and, above all, military, balance of forces between the Palestinians and Israelis had shifted overwhelmingly in Israel’s favor with the collapse of the USSR.  

 It has to be said that during the Cold War years, when the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc countries were strong, it was possible to exert major pressure on occupying powers like Israel (and the UK in the case of Northern Ireland), and win results through armed struggle and military means.  In the current era of US global hegemony this is no longer possible, although Palestinians must still engage in armed struggle simply out of survival, particularly when the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) is willing to slaughter thousands of Palestinians in Gaza at the drop of a hat almost.  And it must be said that this resistance proved effective.  Israel was not able to overrun Gaza with a ground invasion or assert the kind of control it wanted to assert in its bloody assaults in 2009 (Cast Lead) and 2015 (Protective Edge) because it would have meant unacceptable losses.  As small-scale as it might be, the Palestinian armed groups in Gaza still possess a real deterrent which prevents their total colonization by Israel.